This study is designed to address several important issues concerning attachment in the aging process. The examination of intra-individual and inter-individual attachment behaviors is made possible through the availability of cross-sectional, longitudinal and cohort data sets for secondary analysis. The proposed analyses will test the appropriateness of attachement as a life span concept and will also permit the examination of the relationship between attachment and life state variables. It is further anticipated that this research may have implications for social policy in that a re-interpretation of several bodies of literature may become warranted. For example, the reaction of older people to housing relocations might be better understood in terms of attachment loss rather than in the assessment of new facilities. Life span attachments may represent a critical moderating variable in a number of social and personal behavioral outcomes in the field of gerontology specifically and adulthood generally. The proposed study will apply survey methods to issues in developmental psychology and thus provide a cost effective empirical test of life span concept. Reliability and validity of attachment measures will be assessed initially. Factor analyses will be performed to allow the examination of the factor structure of these behaviors. Regression techniques will also be employed to investigate the relationship between background, life state variables and attachment indices. All models accounting for significant proportions of variance will be examined for degree of appropriateness across age, sex, and cohorts. The proposed study should contribute to our knowledge of attachment in the aging process on theoretical, empirical, and methodological levels, and provide the basis for future secondary and original data collection efforts.